Job Searching? Try Slapping a Fake Beard on Your Profile Pic

Quit worrying about the wording of your LinkedIn “about me” section and forget the font on your resume. You know what potential employers really love? Beards. Even fake beards!

This comes via Wired, which tells of what happened when online marketer Javier Sanz decided to play a little game with his profile on ODesk, a site where freelancers can bid on potential gigs. Figuring he looked young for his age, he simply photoshopped a beard onto his avatar. “He figured a beard would make him look older — and more trustworthy,” explains Wired.

But before you start cracking jokes about Brooklyn beekeepers, it actually worked. “When he inquired about job openings as a bearded contractor, the response rate jumped from 12 percent to 35 percent,” according to Wired. That’s triple the interest.

Granted, Sanz’s results are limited to a very specific kind of job-searching, for freelance and contract jobs that tend to be virtual. But, SEO expert that he is, Sanz wants to make this into a testament to the power of little tweak in the coming age of over-the-Internet labor:

Sanz specializes in online marketing, including search engine optimization, or SEO — the tricks that help you get your website noticed on the search engines run by Google and Microsoft. He believes that similar techniques will become increasingly important on new-age job markets like oDesk.

Mostly, though, I’d like someone to run an A/B test to see what happens when female profile pics are swapped for male ones. Betcha I know what happens!